Press Release
HELEN MARTEN
Drunk Brown House
29 September – 20 November 2016
Serpentine Sackler Gallery
The Serpentine presents a major exhibition of new work by London-based
artist Helen Marten (b. 1985, Macclesfield, UK) who has been nominated for
both the 2016 Turner Prize and the inaugural Hepworth Sculpture Prize.
Helen Marten: Drunk Brown House at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery brings
together work never before presented in London with new work in an
installation that has been conceived specifically in relation to the Gallery.
Combining sculpture, text and screen-printed paintings, Marten’s practice
comprises images and objects, often playing with two and three-
dimensionality. Her installations employ visual and linguistic ambiguity in
order to explore the potential for misinterpretation and misunderstanding.
Marten’s sculptural installations often serve as repositories for disparate
material combinations, resulting in an exhibition that calls into question our
changing relationship to the readymade. Underscored by a process of
collaged abstraction, her assemblages resonate with associative meaning.
Creating a string of hieroglyphs or a kind of archaeological anagram, the
work’sencrypted sequences are nevertheless driven by their own internal
logic.
Helen Marten said: “I’m really interested in the point at which things
become husked down to geometric memories of themselves, where a house,
for instance, a pair of legs or a cat could be communicated with huge
economy and speed via just a few lines. The vector can become a
mechanism of delivery. As incorporated extensions, even a simple nod
towards a shape that might be reminiscent of a readymade form is quite
literally a vocaliser of external things – an agent of the world outside artmaking. And this is the point where you can use recognisable authority, the
obstinate fact of a universally existent thing – an arm, a teapot, an alphabet
– and extricate it from its own sense of intentionality.”
Showing concurrently at the Serpentine Gallery is the work of artist Marc
Camille Chaimowicz. Through the combination of diverse media, including
sculpture, painting, film, photography and installation, Helen Marten and
Marc Camille Chaimowicz create immersive environments that respond to
the architecture of the Galleries and weave together fragmentary narratives
in a non-linear manner. Both autumn exhibitions engage with the slippery
nature of materials, distorting perceptions of familiar imagery and objects to
explore the discrepancies between language and memory.
The autumn season continues with James Bridle’s digital commission; the
Serpentine Pavilion designed by Bjarke Ingels (BIG); the Summer Houses
designed by Kunlé Adeyemi (NLÉ), Barkow Leibinger, Yona Friedman and Asif
Khan; and the Park Nights series of live events.
For press information contact:
Rose Dempsey, +44 (0)20 7298 1520
V Ramful, [email protected], +44 (0)20 7298 1519
Press images at serpentinegalleries.org/press
Serpentine Gallery, Kensington Gardens, London W2 3XA
Serpentine Sackler Gallery, West Carriage Drive, Kensington Gardens, London
W2 2AR
Image Credit: Annik Wetter, Geneva Switzerland
Image Caption: Limpet Apology (traffic tenses), 2016, screen printing and painting on leather,
suede, cotton, velvet; stained and sprayed Ash; rolled steel; enamel paint on Balsa wood;
airbrushed steel; resin; magnets; inlaid Formica; Cherry
Notes to Editors
Helen Marten (born 1985, Macclesfield) lives and works in London. Marten
studied at The Ruskin School, University of Oxford (2008) and Central Saint
Martins College of Art and Design (2005). She has had recent solo
exhibitions at Greene Naftali, New York (2016); Museum Fridericianum,
Germany; Sadie Coles HQ, London; Johann König, Berlin (all 2014); CCS Bard
Hessel Museum, New York; Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland; Palais de Tokyo,
Paris; and Chisenhale, London (2012-2013).
Marten was included in the 56th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale,
Italy (2015); the 55th International Art Exhibition, Venice Biennale, Italy and
the 12th Lyon Biennale (both 2013). She was included the recent 20th
Biennale Sydney, and has participated in group exhibitions at The Hirshhorn
Musuem, Washington DC; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; The Kitchen, NYC;
Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo and MoMA PS1, NYC.
Marten received the LUMA Prize (2012) and the Prix Lafayette (2011). She is
nominated for the 2016 Turner Prize as well as the forthcoming Hepworth
Sculpture Prize.
Foreword
Within the last few years, Helen Marten has emerged as one of the most interesting
and energetic artists of her generation. Combining disparate imagery and materials
Marten harnesses and estranges familiar objects to create extraordinary sculptural
assemblages rich in associative meaning. Refusing the viewer the satisfaction of a
totalising picture, Marten’s installations are nevertheless driven by their own material and linguistic logic in a constant interplay between image and object, two and
three dimensions. Using the outlines of recognisable objects as shorthand emblems
for social activity or exchange, Marten builds upon the history of the readymade.
The Serpentine’s collaboration with Marten began before the invitation to
exhibit, with a screening of the video Dust and Piranhas created in response to the
Serpentine Pavilion 2011 designed by Peter Zumthor, as part of the Park Nights series.
Since then, Marten has risen to critical acclaim with an impressive roll call of solo
exhibitions, winning the Prix Lafayette in 2011 and the LUMA Prize in 2012. This year,
she is nominated for both the Turner Prize and the Hepworth Prize for Sculpture.
Marten’s exhibition at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery brings together two,
large-scale installations – The Lemon and The cat from the bacon (both 2016)
– with new works produced especially for the show, including three expansive
sculptures and a series of silkscreen prints. Building on a 2014 work titled White
cotton is so platonic, or something, she has created an expanded figurative form
from welded aluminium that wraps around and pierces the space as a kind of
peripheral envelope. This site-specific element is continued with purpose-built,
fragmented walls that overlay the Gallery’s original brickwork, mirroring one
another in terms of their graphic additions and subtractions. The exhibition’s title
Drunk Brown House refers to this response to the architecture of the Gallery and
to the collapse of semiotic balance in these wonky and misaligned installations.
We are deeply grateful to Marten for accepting our invitation to conceive
of this site-specific installation in response to the Serpentine Sackler Gallery.
Her dedication to this project, her energy and her great enthusiasm has made
for a highly thought-provoking exhibition.
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This accompanying publication adopts a lexicon structure in order to focus
on twelve of Marten’s installations, exploring and unravelling the multiple processes, materials and inspirations that led to their creation. This playful categorisation is brought together with Marten’s own writings, which add an additional
text-based layer of interpretation to her fascinating approach to objects. We are
enormously grateful to the book’s contributors for their insightful and creative
responses to Marten’s work: Brian Dillon, Travis Jeppesen, and Eileen Myles.
There are a number of organisations and individuals whose help and
involvement have been essential to this project: the LUMA Foundation for
their generosity. The Helen Marten Exhibition Circle: Sadie Coles HQ, London;
Greene Naftali, New York; König Galerie, Berlin; T293, Rome; as well as the
Yuz Foundation, and those donors who wish to remain anonymous. We are grateful to Marie and Joe Donnelly for their support of this catalogue. We would
like to express our thanks to the Henry Moore Foundation for their support of
the exhibition and to our Founding Corporate Members, Brookfield and Canary
Wharf Group. We are thankful to Bloomberg Philanthropies for partnering with
us on Serpentine’s Digital Engagement Platform, along with additional support
from the Google Cultural Institute and YouTube. Together, they enable us to
widen the reach of our audiences. Our advisors AECOM and Weil offer their
exceptional expertise to help us realise the ambitions of the artists we work with.
The Council of the Serpentine is an extraordinary group of individuals that
pro­vides ongoing and important assistance to enable the Serpentine to deliver its
ambi­tious Art, Architecture, Education and Public Programmes. We are also sincerely apprecia­tive of the support from the Americas Foundation, the Learning
Council, Patrons, Future Contemporaries and the Benefactors of the Serpentine
Galleries. They play a key role in enabling the Galleries’ programmes. The public funding that the Serpentine receives through Arts Council England provides
an essential contribution towards all of the Galleries’ work and we remain very
thankful for their continued commitment.
Finally, we thank the Serpentine team: Lizzie Carey-Thomas, Head of
Programmes; Amira Gad, Exhibitions Curator; Joseph Constable, Assistant Curator;
Mike Gaughan, Gallery Manager and Joel Bunn, Installation and Production
Manager, who have worked closely with the wider Serpentine Galleries’ staff to
realise this exhibition.
Hans Ulrich Obrist
Yana Peel
Artistic Director CEO
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My work is not about encountering a fixed empirical
problem, but a deciding of how much of an archaeologist you feel like being, how many layers you want
to unearth. I love the process of dragging legibility
into crisis and getting to the kernel of something
where you know it, but cannot name it.
Helen Marten
Today Egyptian
for Helen
Eileen Myles
walking
straightforward
deep navels
broken hips
wide wingspan
smashed nose
wolf
kingly triangular
hat
black woman
black man one step
clear flasks
and tiny vials like I
is it a butt plug
honey got it for you
barfing lion
jewels
clear bottle over head
one leg lifted
bow short across
seemless breast
each arrangement
I must
dishevelled proxy
hole balls
modus griegas sir
I hate money
a face mask composed
of tiny swirls
10
hearts on fabric
o moulded faience
in time some birds are gone
and some birds and
some woman is a
blue beast
claws practically language
prong I didn’t get
copy now
I get to touch you & be
your friend to kiss
entire collection bumps
and holes
over there
sweet water; cool tools
for bird is a golden
arrow giddyup heart
fuck clueless blue elegant
holes web over web
condemned little screw
balls dark horse packed
lightly inking heart
circulating blue not
now I can’t read that
and that’s a later reply
in the centre everything
fades flower wash
open white bowl turn
I’d give everything
for Persia
dark mussed
pardon I stumbled
on my favourite blue
rug
secula
safavida
felpa da la
sickle lives not vase
gleam and stings
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Today Egyptian
Eileen Myles
away underglaze
no words
star tile
inventory of rugs &
shirts
two fools on a boat
I notice that
the flower in the flower
I think you’re the
real thing; blue
flower in flower
white flower in flower
or at your centre & not
oh smoke some pot
& I’ll just read you
poetry
I like ya two buds
blue antelope
I want to do
everything to you
3-holed no four holed
golden spout
red wreaths round & wakes
things up
and a vase in a vase
hungry tendril reaching
cornflower surrounding
clear but dirty
clear but time
clear but golden
clear but spoken
clear but filled in
clear but branched
clear but forced
clear but occupied
clear but fled
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you are not my
compass o shadow
tree that surpasses
every one
slopping yellow
teeny dark cartoon
at the heart
chip
sealed
spotted
deepened
seen
enhanced
worn
bared
promenade
‘n festooned
there’s pineapple outer
leafy open eye drawing
riches to me
I been to Iznik
I placed u in the wall
I sucked your leaf
into my cyclone
late invoked nipple
you pretend to be
a little more withholding
than I do
& robot rug
greasy shiny knowing
you root pushing up
day lips, berries,
hoist the juicy
flow of hands, snakes
& tears, cunty flame
through your warm love
here in my berry
13
Today Egyptian
Eileen Myles
14
L4
tree my stadium
under my sea, w my beads
in my tall throwing pots
somebody change the kangaroos’
diaper, oh you like
the chimera, the ocelot
a lot, watch the phoenix
be burnt to a crisp
rabbits and peacocks
please be peaceful
holy & still
divide into groups
the back of a thought
is the same
you see this thing
come into view
shake deep
blurred brain
brightly shined
flower
rambling road
simply daisy
on silk, snowflake,
militarised each or
gan unique
witnessing my intention
to take something out
to dinner brite
in Iznik
dying the elephants
cry stein green
sway vulva parting clouds
or cars two nations
under one square roof
one errant blue bowl
screaming wealth
butterflies
live in the park,
a pair of Fo dogs
Parsing
Brian Dillon
Diagram
What we need to question is bricks, concrete, glass, our own table manners, our
utensils, our tools, the way we spend our time, our rhythms. To question that
which seems to have ceased forever to astonish us.
Georges Perec, ‘Approaches to What?’ (1973)
The pedagogic practice of diagramming sentences was introduced to American
public schools via the 1877 book Higher Lessons in English by Alonzo Reed
and Brainerd Kellogg. The authors, and as a consequence many generations
of schoolteachers, were convinced that children would better learn the parts
of speech and their proper grammatical deployment if they could visualise the
structure of a sentence. Reed and Kellogg devised a system, simple at first but
capable of endless complication, by which subject, object and predicate occupied
a straight horizontal line, and other elements of the sentence – adjectives and
adverbs, articles and auxiliary clauses – branched from this bough. The relations
of the parts were signalled by a variety of marks or motifs: straight or slanted
descenders, dotted lines and diagonals arrayed like the map of a knotty railway
junction. Depending on a pupil’s temperament or skill, diagramming might be
a game or a chore. In a lecture in 1935, Gertrude Stein said: ‘I really do not
know that anything has ever been more exciting than diagramming sentences.’
Helen Marten’s sculptures, and her intricately tessellated screen prints, are
reminiscent of these diagrammed sentences: sentences whose logic is admirably
complex, even baroque, but whose precise import remains out of reach. Of course,
there are diagrams in which one hopes that the parts represented will behave predictably: the circuit diagram, the sign informing you of a roundabout on the road
ahead. In others – the dinner-party seating plan, an author’s outline for a piece of
writing – what’s required is a certain looseness of action and affinity between the
elements, the possibility of being surprised. Marten’s works, says the artist, who
is also an oblique and accomplished writer, are ‘rhetorical’, overblown; they are
diagrams for sure, but diagrams of the least economical sort. They are made up of
16
materials and motifs that are just too much, or give away too little. And the dealings
between them, the articulations and actions that would correspond in a sentence
to the roles of verbs, conjunctions and prepositions: these are magnificently hard
to parse. The diagram, writes Marten, is a neatly contained or flattened form of
representation. But her diagrams are filled with ‘borderline not-okay symbols’:
repeated figures that threaten to dissolve into collaged abstraction, turning the
whole work into a ‘tautological short-circuit’. There are images of archaeological
sites, and the grids that overlay them, in a work such as Limpet Apology (traffic
tenses) but the coordinates are missing, the scale impossible to grasp. How to
pick these parts apart? How to diagram her diagrams?
Material
Oh, Tomato Purée – let me lay you out and pummel those rigid furrows and
creases, reconnecting your fractured substance, so you might push aside the
residue of previous abundance and come forth again, in all your kitsch and
concentrated splendour.
Claire-Louise Bennett, ‘Oh, Tomato Purée!’, in Pond (2015)
Among the most striking things, initially, about Marten’s work is the amazing
variety of materials it contains – materials that are sometimes allowed to be
themselves and in other cases masquerades, like a lemon or a chicken leg cast
in resin. Consider, for example, the list of materials from which The cat from the
bacon (2016) is made: ‘Steel, aluminium, hand-thrown glazed ceramic, extruded
terracotta, Modelboard, ash, cherry, Valchromat, Sepili, chipboard, cardboard,
sprayed MDF, fur, silk, sequins, cast resin, cast Jesmonite, oil paint on paper,
airbrushed steel, rope, stitched and embroidered fabric, lace, stones, mother of
pearl, rope, tin foil, brass bells, PVC, cast rubber, painted pickle tin, sand, bucket,
micro beads, Formica, engraved brass, copper, matchbooks, beads, cotton string,
Roman bells.’ One effect of such a list is to make one wonder if Marten’s works
are as much inventories as they are diagrams, the artist as easily addicted to the
pleasures of enumeration as array. But more to the point, sculptural-grammar-wise,
what are we to make of this intense profusion, the thrilled cohabiting of such
disparate matter? The impression in a piece like The cat from the bacon is that
substances are at once isolate, solid, intact – observe if you please the stoniness
of these stones, the laciness of this lace – and yet might at any moment transmute or translate into one another. No matter the very deliberate arrangements of
things, and their graphical independence – all is at some level equivalent, equally
digestible in the alimentary machine of the sculptural diagram or sentence.
17
Parsing
Brian Dillon
Or all equally energised and energising: think how many of these materials
have to do with the generation of heat or light, the channelling, containment and
release of electricity. The connecting parts of the diagram – lines and arrows
that indicate points of fleeting or obscure contact – are also made of matter,
not merely abstract. Graphical, that’s to say logical, relationships are enabled,
but potentially undone, by the material of which they are made. All this stuff,
however sturdy and self-present, also feels laminate, as if it might peel away
and disclose some unclean interior, or simply reveal a void.
Quality
The corruption of bodies is a pledge of their resurrection. Hence, the goal of
history is to rediscover in each piece of the past’s flesh the corruptible element
par excellence, not the skeleton but the tissue.
Roland Barthes, Michelet (1954)
‘Leather is ancient, sleazy, academic’, writes Marten in the ‘Lexicon’ that may
or may not provide overt and helpful descriptions of the motifs, materials and
motives in her work. If you were to schematise her art using the grammatical
terms outlined by Reed and Kellogg in 1877, which sort of word or phrase would
dominate in the resulting diagrams? Is it too easy to say that Marten’s is an
adjectival art? Look again at these materials: the leather (actually it is leatherette)
in her screen print Knockoff Venus (2016), for example, is thickly grained and –
what is the word? Pebbled? Particulate? Scaly? Above all, perhaps, leathery? A
wonderful world of tautology opens up, in which we may marvel at the gleaming
allure of airbrushed steel, the silkiness of silk thread, the pearly involutions of
an oyster shell – as in Brood and bitter pass (2016).
It would be more accurate, I think, to say that Marten’s work presents an
expanding set of qualities, which are not reducible to this or that material or
form; they arise instead out of processes, relations and movements. Still, it is
possible to locate and list them in particular works, before passing to the more
abstracted actions in question. There is the quality, for example, of a kind of
degraded graphic language, already touched on above. It consists in an untethered legibility, the proliferation of motifs such as the green cross that denotes
a pharmacy, or the footprints that appear across her recent screen prints and
sculptures. What else? The friability of surfaces – earth or ash or stone. Dry
leaves. The way such surfaces brush against textiles both fine and loosely or
crudely woven. The crumbliness of old brick or chocolate squares. The smokiness that blurs or occludes things in certain places: Marten thinks of smoke less
18
as particulate matter than as a kind of density and even sheen. As always, there
is a tendency for all this matter to turn if not into its opposite then into some
adjacent substance. And colour? Is colour a quality, or instead an ‘accident’ in
the old philosophical sense: an element superadded, not intrinsic to the thing
itself? A green chicken drumstick, a hot pink heart, the arsenical green of a tennis
court, near-faecal extrusions of wood and terracotta: whether ‘real’ or confected,
colour has its codes and conventionally associated qualities, which as Marten
puts it are frequently ‘queered’ in her work.
Action
If the motion of the wind were to be slowed, as weather is slowed briefly when an
animal is born, we would notice a man building and destroying his own house.
Ben Marcus, The Age of Wire and String (1995)
Strictly speaking, a diagram is not a map, does not give us only the spatial arrangement of things, but must represent those components in action – the diagram is
or ought to be dynamic: it’s as much a picture of operations as the entities on
which or between which they are carried out. In this sense, the diagram shares
something with the cartoon strip and with animation, where the static cell or
frame is the stable basis, but movement is really all, and lines have come alive.
What are the movements, the articulations involved in sculpture conceived
as a diagram or cartoon? An inventory of the actions in Marten’s work would
have to include certain ‘dumb’ forms of spatial relation; sculpture in some
respects is simply a matter of putting one thing on top of another. The strictly
vertical pile or stack is a signature motif, with venerable antecedents, that in
Marten’s hands can appear both monumental and alarmingly ad hoc. (In fact,
the act of placing, like most elements in her work, has been determined well in
advance, during a protracted stage of drawing and design.) She writes: ‘Collage
is dealing with physicality in a way that is blatant – what we see are things on
top of other things.’ These things touch, they connect, but they also occlude other
things. Much of Marten’s work seems exercised by fine distinctions between
different modes of making things meet. At this level the work is full of verbs:
the objects may stand or sit on one another, they abut, they attend, they hang
or depend, they pivot, they appear to supervise or govern other objects. (A jug,
she says, is the boss, some attendant spoons its employees.) Above all, they
articulate, connect and move, in concert and independently. In a work such as
Brood and bitter pass it feels as though we’re never done with different modes
of potential movement or action. A larval structure made of interlocking modules
19
Parsing
Brian Dillon
(of disparate design and materials) hangs from a shelf-like unit on the gallery
wall. As often in Marten’s sculptures, a diversity of objects is meticulously
littered about the scene, including seed pods, shells, walnuts and sequins. Off
to one side, a crooked junction of glazed ceramic suggests that the work is a
matter of directed but unruly flow, a notional or diagrammed sort of plumbing.
Grammar
Think in stitches. Think in sentences. Think in settlements. Think in willows.
Think in respect. Think in farther. Think with while they will.
Gertrude Stein, How to Write (1931)
Marten’s is an art of grammar and articulation, but the governing logic has been
deliciously skewed. The disposal of things in space, their surfaces lucent or scrabbled, the gestures they seem to perform for each other, adventures undertaken in
each other’s company – all of this is legible, articulate, patterned and at the same
time so oblique that it will not resolve itself into a second diagram, the diagram
that would make sense of it all, construe it like an actual sentence. Marten’s own
writing, with its odd inclinations, its lightness and bouts of erudition, offers some
clues: her occasional texts and ongoing ‘Lexicon’ hint at concerns that are formal,
conceptual, political and everyday, ephemeral. But she lets us know too that her
written language is as much a ‘bastard handwriting’ as her visual and sculptural:
‘I bite and shred my fingers terribly, to the extent that they often bleed and little
traces of blood streak themselves embarrassingly on the things I touch. It is a
disgustingly compulsive and strangely signatory practice.’ We need not believe
that this is the artist speaking, without guile or veil, in order to conclude that both
her art and her writing are ways of blurring and staining the diagram, finishing
and frustrating the exercise, mastering and mocking the grammar of her sentence.
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21
Carbs
Travis Jeppesen
When crossing the street, you get hit by a car and a brass band plays. If the
world is really coming to an end, why must it take so goddamn long? You put
it all into a box in order to FUCK IT and not feel so sad. Sad, about which way
you seem to be headed – the journey downwards oh so lonely. The paradox
of originating anything, even when it’s a mistake; the reward is to march to a
dingdong no one else can hear. Everywhere expressive of those dignitaries that
tell no lives. Lives apart – a burning match. It seems you were almost ready
for it – the excess carbs – a sound you cannot actually hear. Still, you chase
it – as though there could be any alternative on a cold dark night. Reminders
of summer again – everyone lost, horny, desperate. Those cravings for fulfillment that can’t actually be met. Soon you will return to the loveliness of the
bedroom, have a spine once again. Hear me, smell me, be myselves and a part
of all this. Apart from it, too. The rats on the floor.
The rat is a city you have been invited to invade.
Invade that rat with the wrath of the uninvited.
A city has not ploy; it is only a play.
Devastated to be a part of it, you seek refuge in the infantilism of decay.
The floor is your best friend. That is why you were allowed to eat it.
Think of it as a rat biting its own tail in order to avoid having a love affair. You
have to singe the connections among disparate elements to imbue the whole
with the bisexual burden of texture. A horse’s granular animosity towards its
own gene pool won’t prevent it from having children – nor should it.
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You imbue the city with a rat-like texture in order to feel alive once again.
Not run-over. You lie on the bed, a string quartet. A city has excesses tough to
digest. Fattens you up while making you stronger. Rats have spines also. Stay
far far away from the rattrap. In some cases, knowing from a distance suffices.
We are without the burden of logic. That’s because we are that burden. You
can’t own something that you are.
Burden bangs a bog – the stemliness of fog.
Everytime a nighttime array. Once you have shattered the force of a day.
The body blobs, a thing. Sometimes you wish you could cut out all the excess
and make it into something, a sculpture. To be externally extended – all that
excess out of you. You sit at home in your cage in the city with your pet rat.
There are so many variables – their elasticity – it’s amazing. What emanates
from the sky each time you close your eyes and try to eat it. Your best friend
is the floor. You’re becoming-rat while a folk song plays.
The feeling of defeat is not limited to those lesser beings we tend to regard as
variable-challenged. An alligator’s tonsils might be re-purposed as the material
for a globe: the minute a city quickens its pulse, it has already run past us. In
the malignance duties of a stale forecaster, opportune eye-chafings await their
momentum. Zigzag tree branches don’t necessarily cause a forest to happen.
In the internet of a bee-sting, lovebites end up being too much a primordial
thong – particularly when that thong is made out of lint.
You have no more friends. You are only a city.
Very often, you put your foot on display in the hopes that it might morph into
an axe.
Syntax is amazing. Just think of all the little hairs.
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Carbs
Travis Jeppesen
Exacerbate the typography once before it starts to form you. You hid from the
lexicon while a rat licked your brain. Seconds are green, minutes are yellow.
Yesterday was a hot pink bathetic burden, and you refuse to shave when you’re
inside of a decade.
Rat entropy is such a sexy guise. Especially when the sum total of your being
amounts to a puddle on the floor – little ribbon down there with a hand-written
‘Wait!’
You gave up on yourself before you even became part of the rat race;
celebratory trumpet blares. Now you’ve found other selves to give up upon,
other species to eat with; a lone violin.
Soothing, the being-standard of the thing.
Get it on out, so you can blare it, blast it. Diet on ratcarbs so as to lose the
blubber that binds you. Unbegotten to the deadened line. All a part of it, this
creation. So that nothing might fall out: an empty avalanche, this day. Subscribe
to disorder so that the life-blood . . .
Just a tiny bit of seethe.
The waiter asks for something. Slimy hint of indifference, like a politician’s decision. Tonight you count away the hours, until they come to own you:
that’s the simplicity of defeat.
The sky is an envelope, you see, and we are the contained. Not the contents,
but the contained. For we are done with inventing ourselves – some other god
now controls us. We were sold off, like slices of bad debt, to pay for the cosmos’ make-over.
Tomorrow night you’ll dream a satellite. The way a voice echoes in a vase.
Crystalline substance had its heyday – until it was over.
New rocks a shade of wooden granite. Clover.
Don’t tear up that envelope – it might have a paycheck inside.
Magnetic fire hose has no idea.
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Pant elongation not necessarily a boner. The sunny fade that made a day disappear. Filthy weapons that are sure to invent their own mothering device without
the aid of heaven. End the mediation process before it collapses all molluskesque.
Rat with no friends gets hit by a car.
The sky is a boner. Without the sunshine to get away from you. The rat goes
on a carb-free diet. Roiled upon the fence, we are there. The light was bright
before it had a chance to attain yellow and green. What you meant to say was
before you got away. Turn the light off to attain it better.
The sky’s protein. Despite what its name may conjure, gluconeogenesis is actually
not in the Bible. Nor are ratcarbs synthetic; rather, energy should be thought of
as an enveloping blaze that extends our past lives into the intension of yesterday
morning. You don’t have to be drunk to know this. You have to go on a diet to
understand.
Instant-shadow your fair fidelity flop. Colonial misanthropologist off the beaten
trailface. Leaning in to figuration so grim, it is a transfer: a germinal faggotry
extending its finesse against ostrich fur magnets.
Tomorrow bends superiority in the alightness. Webs of interiority not
built to be forgiven.
Deliberately ignore what you hope to expect.
Busted surmise lapped up with the callous breath of animal-object’s
enfrothed latitude.
Hazing crooked upon the shadowware, a starred silence greets these impeccables like a hidden protein.
We don’t deserve to breed copies of the home we’ve forgotten about.
25
Carbs
Travis Jeppesen
A car in the city hits you. No brass band plays. Mushroom machinery undoubted.
Were the prophylactics devised on the field, could we still speak of a plane?
Among other questions you forgot to ask in the process of becoming alone.
Biological holocaust a pale yellow.
Rats, too, have their misgivings. The memory of a thing is what cannot be
proven. All those hovering quinine lodges where the stink breeds gayishly.
A risible occasion we might all run away from. Into starch, which is where the
rat plutocracy farms meaning.
Scale versus texture: the eternal gut rebellion. People laughing at their own
fur. A world of objects unbridled. Resting on your best friend, which upholds
them. Fabrics and stone competing. Who will win king-of-the-rats. There are
rubies in that dungeon, and they caress you equanonymously. Like a folded-up
blimp plinth, they denounce you to your fellow line-inferences.
Mechanicity of deadweight survival in a world to blame. Smell the architecture inside your brain. Know the floor is still your friend. Symphony of
dingdongs, ticktocks, voidful vibrations.
26
L4